Mining Capitalism and Contentious Politics in Bangladesh

This dissertation analyses a social movement in Bangladesh fighting a potentially environmentally destructive resource extraction project as well as the country’s neoliberal energy policies. Grassroots community grievances against an open pit coalmine in Phulbari in the northwest region started small but culminated in a multi-scalar social movement, including anti-corporate mobilization against privatization of resource extraction at the national level. It also inspired a group of transnational advocacy groups to support the anti-mining movement. Drawing on critical development, social movement, and critical globalization scholarships, the dissertation analyses three distinct scales of the anti-coalmine social mobilizations: local, national, and transnational. Based on a set of qualitative interviews with local/national activists and transnational advocacy groups, I examine each of these scales through the lens of a specific theoretical approach. At the local level, drawing on scholarship on critical development studies, I consider the development of contentious political agency of grassroots communities to analyse the dynamics of the counter-movement against ‘accumulation by dispossession.’ At the national scale, I engage with critical globalization scholarship to analyse discourses of a radical social organization to challenge neoliberal development and its dominant narrative of capitalist modernity. I pay attention to the significance of its political rhetoric (nationalist imaginaries) to articulate a counter-hegemonic political agenda. Finally, at the transnational level, I use sociological scholarship on transnational activism to analyse the mobilization of transnational advocacy groups supporting grassroots mobilization to critically reflect on the dynamics of alliances of differently positioned actors who, although united to achieve a common goal, share different worldviews on how to confront the power of global capital in the periphery. I conclude with the lessons learned from the analysis of the Phulbari movement. I focus on three issues: the salient features of the movement, which can be applied in other cases, the significance of the Phulbari movement to confront resource extraction, and a note on rethinking coal politics in the era of climate crisis.

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